Conrad and Masculinity

Masculinity and the Body 79
disintegrated mass thrown hither and thither’ (the same paradox of
conglomeration and fragmentation, both feared). 39 This similarity is
indicative of the fact that, as Stallybrass and White argue, ‘transcodings
between different levels and sectors of social and psychic reality
are effected through the intensifying grid of the body’ (PPT, 26) – the
transcodings in this case being between race and class. The idea of the
Chinamen as only body also appears in one of Jukes’s many racist
conceptions: ‘they say a Chinaman has no soul’ (T, 101).
The vision of the hold as a ‘yawning grave’ hints at the abjection of
the dead body, and that association of the labourers with abjection
becomes stronger near the end of the story, in Jukes’s description of
their possessions: ‘We ... shovelled out on deck heaps of wet rags, all
sorts of fragments of things without shape, and that you couldn’t give
a name to, and let them settle the ownership themselves’ (102). James
Hansford links this to the theme of language and meaning in the
story, and particularly to MacWhirr’s confidence in the ‘clear and definite
language’ (T, 15) of facts. Hansford contrasts the dollars, which
are ‘named, shaped, distributable items’, and which MacWhirr takes
the trouble to distribute equally, with the ‘bits of nameless rubbish’ (T,
7) (identified as such even before the damage wrought by the
storm). 40 It might at first sight seem hyperbolic to apply Kristeva’s
concept of the abject to the damaged possessions of the Chinese
labourers, but such an application becomes plausible and even necessary
when the description of those possessions is seen in terms of the
inscription of meanings – social, sexual, political – onto bodies: the
bodies of individual men, bodies of men in a collective sense (the
crew, the Chinese labourers), the body of the ship. The ‘nameless’
quality of the damaged possessions (always bearing in mind that this
description is part of Jukes’s letter, and therefore explicitly filtered
through a racist mind) associates them both with the excluded quality
of the abject and with abjection as the loss or failure of meaning: they
are seen as merely material, matter devoid of meaning, in contrast to
the significant and signifying dollars. Like the bodies of the Chinese
men, rolled together in the hold, the possessions have become indistinct,
a mass, an abject arousing fear and desire. They thus partake of
the material and bodily (bearing in mind that they include ‘clothes of
ceremony’) (T, 7), as that which falls outside or is excluded by rationality
and signification. Yet, bringing to bear the analysis of
discourses of high and low made by Stallybrass and White, and the
insights of postcolonial theory into the construction of the Eastern
‘mass’ as Other to the Western imperial subject, we can see this